A Trialogue-Based Spoken Dialogue System for Assessment of English Language Learners

Current automated assessment techniques for English language learners evaluate comprehension and synthesis skills via written text or one-turn spoken responses, measuring essential skills needed for academic and professional environments. However, as these current tests do not include dialogue-based components, they cannot provide insight into the conversational competence of the testtaker. This paper presents the first steps toward a dialogue-based, computer-driven assessment by introducing a spoken dialogue system designed to assess the English language skills of young children, and which provides scaffolding via its three-party trialogue-based structure. We show that it is possible to combine offthe-shelf components from the Olympus and Virtual Human Toolkits to quickly create a system with virtual characters and spoken language interaction for automated English language assessment.